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'We're the good guys', insists Hacking Team founder

David Vincenzetti, founder of Milan-based company Hacking Team, has spoken publicly for the first time since the organisation was targeted by hackers last week. "I think that what happened is not the work of any people but that the attack, because of its complexity, should be conducted at government level or by an organisation that possessed very considerable funds," Vincenzetti told Italian newspaper La Stampa.

Over 400GB of data was stolen from the company altogether, including an archive of email, which have proved to be both the most interesting and most incriminating part of the data haul. The emails showed that Hacking Team had invoiced Sudan and the Lebanese for work -- despite having previously said that it had never done business with Sudan. It had also sold its spyware to Bahrain and Kazakhstan, the emails revealed. Cyprus' intelligence chief was forced to resign from his post after it was revealed that he had purchased Hacking Team software.

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Vincenzetti now admits that Hacking Team did do business with Sudan; he doesn't present an excuse for doing so, but does hit back against claims that the company could be in hot water legally for breaking the UN arms embargo against the country, to which the EU is signed up. "We do not trade in weapons, we do not sell guns that can be used for years," he said. A few weeks without receiving updates, the software becomes useless, he added.

As for other countries Hacking Team has done business with, Vincenzetti does present excuses. On the company's relationship with Libya, he said that "we did it when suddenly it seemed that the Libyans had become our best friends". And when asked about Hacking Team's software being used to persecute journalists in Ethiopia, he said: "when we heard that Galileo had been used to spy on a journalist opponent of the government, we asked about this, and finally in 2014 we decided to close the supply."

This isn't particularly a concern for Vincenzetti, however. Just as Hacking Team can release updates that can their software unusable if it wanted to shut off access, it can also update it to make it secure again. "Within a few days we will release updates that can overcome the problem. By the end of the year will be released later version 10 software, which will exceed totally what happened. As for Adobe, it has been patching up its own products independently.

Given the sheer size of the dataset stolen, revelations are continuing to emerge about Hacking Team's business deals. The latest accusation is that the company worked with Italian police to fraudulently hijack IP addresses that did not belong to it. There will, no doubt, be more like this to come. In the meantime, Vincenzetti still insists of Hacking Team that "we're the good guys".